It’s hard to imagine a for-profit company that does not incorporate customer feedback into its business model. Whether it’s Apple smoothing out glitches in a software update based on user experience or hotel staff responding to comments posted on TripAdvisor, customer reviews are integral to a company’s success and in turn enhance those customers’ engagement and empowerment.

In this light, it’s odd that there is not a similar integration of feedback in the non-profit sector. Non-profits serve clients just as businesses serve customers, and their impact is closely tied to understanding those clients’ needs. However, feedback is often obtained anecdotally or in an ad-hoc manner, and it’s very rarely embedded into non-profit programming. This gap may be at least partially attributable to the cost — surveys can be expensive to administer and analyse, and grant budgets may constrain their use — but grantmakers should not overlook the value of feedback in achieving meaningful impact.

Two AVPN members have begun incorporating feedback into their partnerships with grantees: the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation with Women’s Property Initiatives (WPI)–a social enterprise which promotes housing opportunities for women by capping mortgages at twenty percent of their income–and the Expedia Group with Daughters of Tomorrow, a Singapore-based non-profit dedicated to facilitating livelihood opportunities for underprivileged women. To do this, they piloted the Listen4Good (L4G) program in Asia. An initiative of the Fund for Shared Insight, L4G supports nonprofits through a five-step feedback process designed with the recognition that philanthropists cannot perfectly understand the needs and experiences of their beneficiaries without hearing directly from them.

The tragic events in Charlottesville, VA, and President Trump's failure to unequivocally repudiate the ideology of neo Nazis/white supremacists/alt right groups and their violence presents American philanthropy with a unique moment to help move our country forward in achieving its promise that ALL are created equally.
If military and corporate leaders can find their voice to denounce hatred, racism and anti-Semitism, surely philanthropy can set a higher bar for itself.
Philanthropy must use its voice and financial resources to engage in research, advocacy and lobbying (community foundations) to eliminate the systemic racism and other bias that permeates our policing and criminal justice, housing, healthcare, employment, voting rights and education systems resulting in unfair outcomes. Remaking these systems will provide the fairness that the country has aspired to achieve and start to upend the prevailing narrative that only white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant men are deserving of the American dream.
This will be extremely hard work and philanthropy must avoid political correctness that only certain viewpoints or life experiences are valid. However, the invitation to sit at the discussion table will require a commitment to our country's ideals of diversity and inclusion. A belief in racial superiority cannot co-exist with the belief that everyone is created equally. America has a precious moment to recommit the nation to equally working for all who share its values and philanthropy has the opportunity to help lead the way.
Read the source article at Silicon Valley Community Foundation

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